افزایش رقابت پذیری سازمانی از طریق رسانه های اجتماعی – استراتژی به عنوان چشم انداز عمل Enhancing Organisational Competitiveness Via Social Media – a Strategy as Practice Perspective

1 Introduction The use of social media in organisations has advanced from experimentation to mainstream level implementation (Pillet and Carillo 2016), with the aim of increasing competitiveness and gaining business value for organisations (Bughin and Chui 2013). Social media platforms are significant for enhancing competitiveness (Aswani et al. 2017) and obtaining business value as they instantaneously produce real-time information with global reach: most platforms such as Facebook has more than a billion users (Piskorski 2014). For organisations to remain competitive, they need to use social media, as it provides organisations with affordance such as communication visibility (Leonardi 2015) that were not achievable with previous forms of Information Technology (IT) (Treem and Leonardi 2012). For instance, social media enables new communication processes within and outside of organisational boundaries (Scott and Orlikowski 2012), as well as allowing customers to communicate with other customers on a scale and scope that was not achievable by previous forms of Information Technology (Gallaugher and Ransbotham 2010). Hence, information may become more visible and accessible to the public, and allow more information gathering or monitoring which suggests that social media platforms have material properties that are different from other technologies used in organisations. Social media use has begun to thrive in organisations (Joos 2008), reconfiguring the dynamics of organisational culture, networks, and power relations (Castelló et al. 2016). Nonetheless, few studies have researched the impact of how social media provides a new context for engagement in organisations (Leonardi and Vaast 2016; Orlikowski and Scott 2008). The existing studies on social media within organisations have been mainly along three streams. First, is the body of research on social media marketing (e.g. Berthon et al. 2012; Gallaugher and Ransbotham 2010; Kaplan and Haenlein 2011). The second stream of social media research examines the predictive power of social media (e.g. Dewan and Ramaprasad 2014; Luo et al. 2013). The third stream of social media research is concerned with how organisations use social media as a strategy to achieve organisational goals (e.g. Braojos-Gomez et al. 2015; Culnan et al. 2010; Piskorski 2014). Although organisations are beginning to understand the significance of social media for their organisations, they still face some challenges. For instance, how to formulate social media strategies (Kietzmann et al. 2011) and how to implement and strategically use social media strategies (Bharati et al. 2014; Kietzmann et al. 2011). Furthermore, organisations face challenges regarding how they should organise and manage social media within their organisation and what broader changes in organisational structure and processes are needed for the implementation of social media (Aral et al. 2013). Thus, taking into consideration these existing challenges, and considering the lack of literature examining these issues, it can be argued that further research to understand how social media strategy emerges and its implications on structure and processes within organisations is needed.